Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-m9pkr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-12T00:31:28.027Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Aesthetics and the New Ethics: Theorizing the Novel in the Twenty-First Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Dorothy J. Hale
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In the introduction to a 2002 special issue of diacritics on ethics and interdisciplinarity, mark sanders asks us to consider, “What points of contact, if any, are there between the current investment in ethics in literary theory, and the elaboration of ethics in contemporary philosophy?” (3). Yet the question behind this question—the one that motivates his selection of essays for the issue—is why literary critics and theorists have drawn their ideas about ethics from Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Alain Badiou but have felt little or no need to consult past or present moral philosophers. As Sanders goes on to note, while “in North America and the Anglophone world generally, the tendency in ethics has been to bring moral reflection to bear on questions in political theory,” there “has been relatively little attention among literary theorists to developments in disciplinary philosophy” (4).

Type
The Changing Profession
Information
PMLA , Volume 124 , Issue 3 , May 2009 , pp. 896 - 905
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2009

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Altieri, Charles. The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003. Print.Google Scholar
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005. Print.10.1515/9781400826193CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Print.Google Scholar
Armstrong, Nancy. How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719–1900. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. Print.Google Scholar
Attridge, Derek. Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988. Print.Google Scholar
Bernstein, Michael André. Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Print.Google Scholar
Blair, Sara. Henry James and the Writing of Race and Nation. New York: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print.Google Scholar
Booth, Wayne. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Print.Google Scholar
Buell, Lawrence. “In Pursuit of Ethics.” Introduction. PMLA 114.1 (1999): 7–19. Print.Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. “Values of Difficulty.” Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena. Ed. Culler, Jonathan and Lamb, Kevin. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. 199–215. Print.Google Scholar
Critchley, Simon. Ethics, Politics, Subjectivity: Essays on Derrida, Levinas, and Contemporary French Thought. New York: Verso, 1999. Print.Google Scholar
Davis, Todd F., and Womack, Kenneth. Mapping the Ethical Turn: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 2001. Print.Google Scholar
Diamond, Cora. “Henry James, Moral Philosophers, Moralism.” Henry James Review 18.3 (1997): 243–57. Print.Google Scholar
Eaglestone, Robert. Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1997. Print.Google Scholar
Freedman, Jonathan. Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Print.Google Scholar
Gibson, Andrew. Postmodernity, Ethics, and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas. New York: Routledge, 1999. Print.Google Scholar
Gilmore, Michael T. “The Book Marketplace, I.” The Columbia History of the American Novel. Emory Elliott, gen. ed. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. 46–71. Print.Google Scholar
Glowacka, Dorota, and Boos, Stephen, eds. Between Ethics and Aesthetics: Crossing the Boundaries. Albany: State U of New York P, 2002. Print.Google Scholar
Hale, Dorothy J. “Fiction as Restriction: Self-Binding in New Ethical Theories of the Novel.” Narrative 15.2 (2007): 187–206. Print.10.1353/nar.2007.0010CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hale, Dorothy J. Social Formalism: The Novel in Theory from Henry James to the Present. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. Print.Google Scholar
Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. “The Hunger of Martha Nussbaum.” Representations 77 (2002): 52–81. Print.10.1525/rep.2002.77.1.52CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. Print.Google Scholar
Helgesson, Stefan. Writing in Crisis: Ethics and History in Gordimer, Ndebele and Coetzee. Scottsville: U of KwaZulu-Natal P, 2004. Print.Google Scholar
Horton, John. “Life, Literature, and Ethical Theory: Martha Nussbaum on the Role of the Literary Imagination in Ethical Thought.” Literature and the Political Imagination. Ed. Horton, and Baumeister, Andrea T. New York: Routledge, 1996. 70–97. Print.Google Scholar
Huffer, Lynne. “‘There Is No Gomorrah’: Narrative Ethics in Feminist and Queer Theory.” Differences 12.3 (2001): 1–32. Print.10.1215/10407391-12-3-1CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacobs, Karen. The Eye's Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2001. Print.Google Scholar
James, Henry. The Art of the Novel. New York: Scribner's, 1962. Print.Google Scholar
James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady. New York: Norton, 1995. Print.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1981. Print.Google Scholar
Jerrold, Levinson, ed. Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. Print.Google Scholar
Marchitello, Howard, ed. What Happens to History: The Renewal of Ethics in Contemporary Thought. New York: Routledge, 2001. Print.Google Scholar
McGinn, Colin. Ethics, Evil, and Fiction. New York: Clarendon, 1997. Print.Google Scholar
Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Print.Google Scholar
Miller, J. Hillis. The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James, and Benjamin. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Print.Google Scholar
Miller, J. Hillis. Literature as Conduct: Speech Acts in Henry James. New York: Fordham UP, 2005. Print.10.5422/fso/9780823225378.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Newton, Adam Zachary. Narrative Ethics. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Print.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, Martha C. Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. Print.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, Martha C. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life. Boston: Beacon, 1995. Print.Google Scholar
Nussbaum, Martha C. “The Professor of Parody.” New Republic 22 Feb. 1999: 37–45. Print.Google Scholar
Ozick, Cynthia. “What Henry James Knew” and Other Essays on Writers. London: Jonathan Cape, 1993. Print.Google Scholar
Palmer, Frank. Literature and Moral Understanding: A Philosophical Essay on Ethics, Aesthetics, Education, and Culture. New York: Clarendon, 1992. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pippin, Robert B. Henry James and Modern Moral Life. New York: Cambridge UP, 2000. Print.Google Scholar
Porter, Carolyn. Seeing and Being: The Plight of the Participant Observer in Emerson, James, Adams, and Faulkner. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1981. Print.Google Scholar
Rainsford, Dominic, and Woods, Tim, eds. Critical Ethics: Text, Theory, and Responsibility. London: Macmillan, 1999. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Robbins, Bruce. “Pretend What You Like: Literature under Construction.” The Question of Literature: The Place of the Literary in Contemporary Theory. Ed. Bissell, Elizabeth Beaumont. New York: Manchester UP, 2002. 190–206. Print.Google Scholar
Sanders, Mark. “Ethics and Interdisciplinarity in Philosophy and Literary Theory.” Introduction. Ethics. Ed. Sanders. Spec. issue of Diacritics 32.3-4 (2002): 3–16. Print.10.1353/dia.2005.0006CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Ethics and Politcs in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of Teaching.” Ethics. Ed. Sanders, Mark. Spec. issue of Diacritics 32.3-4 (2002): 17–31. Print.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Trilling, Lionel. “Manners, Morals, and the Novel.” Kenyon Review 10.1 (1948): 11–27. Print.Google Scholar